Photos courtesy of the artist: Massimo Scolari's "The Last Known City II" oil on canvas.

NEW HAVEN -- Walking through the gallery of the Yale School of Architecture, one would be forgiven if not sure whether this were an exhibit by an artist or an architect.

In fact, "Massimo Scolari: The Representation of Architecture, 1967-2012," the exhibit which runs through May 2 in the Paul Rudoplh Hall exhibition space, is probably one of the best representations of that right brain-left brain synergy of artist and engineer that defines the best architects.

Scolari remains in a class by himself in many ways. The William B. and Charlotte Shepherd Davenport Visiting Professorship of Architectural Design at Yale since 2006, he curated this show, which is the first retrospective of his work in the U.S. since 1986.

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He is also an architect whose resume doesn't grocery-list building project after building project, which is a source of curiosity.

Director of Exhibitions Brian Butterfield says it's a question Scolari, much to his frustration, is asked often: How can you be called an architect if you don't design buildings?

"He does these monumental sculptures that are incredible architecture," says Butterfield. "They are not buildings, but you can go into them. The way they're conceived may be watercolors, but they're drawn to a level of precision you can build off. In that way, he's an architect."

Scolari's intricately detailed and flawlessly executed watercolors and oils, from tiny 3-by-3-inch ones ("Alpine Architecture" is a series of tiny gems), to larger works on cardboard, masonite, paper and linen and sculptures, are wondrous examples of both technical skill and an imagination that obviously is inspired by mythology and sci-fi, sometimes both in the same work.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the school, compares Scolari's multimedia and three-dimensional work to Venetian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi in the 18th century and Joseph Gandy in the 19th -- "artist-architects whose principal expression is through the representation of ideas rather than their tectonic realization."

What could or might be, as opposed to what will be, one might say. This exhibit, with more than 160 items, showcases both those artistic works with Scolari's architectural models, including sketches and renderings from his days as a student at Italy's Politecnico di Milano in the 1960s to his collaborations with Aldo Rossi.

Scolari's design career is well represented by his considerable contributions to the Venice Biennale, the international architecture show, particularly in 1991 when he unveiled his massive sculpture "Wings." A half-scale model of his abstract glider, Glider 2012, fabricated by West Haven's Westmont Group on commission for the exhibit, hangs above the main exhibit space.

The drawings, paintings and a video cover the walls of the side riser areas, while cases with scale models of buildings such as "The Ark," study sketches and vintage photographs of several large-scale sculptures such as "Wings" and "Thunderbolt," fill the main floor.

But it is still the paintings, some of which have been compared to the surrealist Rene Magritte, that compel.

Daniel Sherer, a lecturer in architectural history at the School of Architecture, notes in the exhibit catalog that Scolari's vision was more a "suspension of both present and past in an architectural vision in which all forms of historical reference cancel each other out ...," adding that "nostalgia plays no role in Scolari's visionary architectures, as there is no home to yearn for in a world of dead cities."

One homage to his fascination with abandoned or lost cities is "The Last Known City II," which could be Atlantis -- a brick edifice with a smoke-spewing chimney rising through the air surrounded by underground ocean and mountains in what looks like the light of a full moon.

It's both painterly and draftsmanly, a hallmark of Scolari's technique and his fascination with form and shape.

A licensed pilot, he also seems to have a fascination with flying and wings, as well as what lies beneath the surface, borrowing both from Icarus and NASA for the latter, or as Sherer describes, "a striving for the unknown, an objective implicitly connected to the tension between Icarus, who flies above earthly concerns, and Daedalus, who buries architecture in the ground ..."

Butterfield says they also represent the struggle within architecture, "this kind of juxtaposition of both the future and the past, the idea that there are these latent forms of the past in architecture. ..."

It's represented in works such as "Dream of a Shadow, the Man," a 2011 watercolor where a nude man, his hand resting on a rocket by his side, surveys another Atlantis-like landscape over whose buildings a wedge-like object flies.

Or, the oil "The Horror of Nocturnal Silence," where a "Wings"-like v-shaped flyer soars across what appears to be a planetary surface toward a pristine geometric stone construction.

Scolari's fascination with all artful things extended to furniture design and the theater, too, where he not only designed the set, but also the costumes for "Generazioni del cielo," a 1986 production at the Metastasio Theater in Prato.

The measure of the man is also found in his fascinating book appropriately bound with a cover resembling a pocket bible, called "Considerations and Aphorisms on Drawing."

It's open for visitors to leaf through the pen-and-ink sketches of various subjects animate and inanimate interspersed with such insights as, "A poorly painted landscape doesn't keep us from admiring it; a building poorly designed will surely be a sorry landscape."

Or, "The inexplicability of lines is the signal of excess; a beautiful drawing is silent."

Laura Silvestrini helped design this fine exhibit, along with Butterfield, who says the reaction has been "fantastic. ... Massimo's (Feb. 9) lecture was incredibly well attended, and the (adjunct) symposium event was the most well-attended event here, with more than 400 people in the gallery."